Stakeholder preferences for ecosystem services provided by wetlands in Eswatini

Wetlands sustainability and their capacity to provide ecosystem services is threatened by increasing land pressure and climate change effects. Wetlands are also complex ecosystems that present several challenges to public agencies charged with their sustainable use and management. This thesis explores three aspects of wetlands management that are relatively less explored in the environmental economics literature. First, there is little empirical evidence on the associations between wetland interventions, ecosystem services, and threats to wetlands. The first essay systematically reviewed literature to assess the potential associations between wetland interventions, ecosystem services, and threats to wetlands. Second, research on the economic valuation of environmental goods and services has paid less attention to their cultural services relative to provisioning, regulating, and supporting services, yet the former are important for cultural continuity. The second essay addresses this gap and is an attempt to measure the economic value of cultural services. Third, a major constraint to sustainable wetlands management is that users and public decision-makers often have different perceptions about how they function and often disagree on the relative importance of their different ecosystem services. The different perceptions and disagreements have led to wetland management issues being identified as “wicked problems”, i.e., intractable problems embedded in complex systems, difficult to define, and without clear solutions. “Wicked problems” are evident in the lack of consensus among stakeholders on the definition and solutions to wetland management challenges. Complex wetland management challenges are often created by the variety of stakeholders with conflicting interests. Conflicts often arise from the different perceptions on the relative importance of ecosystem services and disagreements. The wetland management challenges are evident in disputes between public authorities and households as well as between public authorities themselves. Following the wicked problems literature, stakeholder involvement is imperative in designing long-term solutions to wetland management challenges and a better understanding of the different stakeholder perspectives should contribute to reducing ecosystem management’s wickedness. The main objective of the third essay was to identify the different worldviews about the ecosystem services provided by a wetland. The first essay reports on the systematic review of studies in southern Africa and the potential associations between wetland interventions, ecosystem services, and threats to wetlands. Three main wetland interventions were identified i.e., wetland management, wetland rehabilitation, and wetland restoration. Interventions such as wetland policies, wetland preservation, and wetland conservation were reported in combination with the three main interventions. Cultural services were one of the least reported ecosystem services (n = 3, 8%). The results show that wetland degradation is mostly caused by population growth, which leads to an increase in agriculture and the construction of infrastructure to accommodate the rising demands of people for shelter, food, and water. Wetland management interventions were associated with threats such as invasive alien plants, grazing, canalisation, unregulated wetland use, and urban developments. Likewise, wetland rehabilitation interventions were associated with grazing and canalisation while wetland restoration was only associated with invasive alien plants. Moreover, wetland management and wetland rehabilitation interventions were associated with wetland agriculture and fibre (reeds and sedge) production. The second essay reports on a discrete choice experiment that was designed to elicit preferences for cultural services using the special case of reed dance and wetlands in Eswatini. The reed dance is traditional ceremony where young maidens honour the Queen Mother by cutting reeds from wetlands which are then presented to her and eventually used for repairing the windbreaks around the royal residence, in Eswatini. Three split samples were used with respective payment vehicle types, i.e., household tax, contribution, and reduced subsidy. The results suggested that respondents had positive attitudes and perceptions towards wetland management. Surprisingly however, the price attribute had a positive sign indicating that respondents experienced positive utility from paying higher taxes. Several explanations could lead to this theoretically inconsistent result. First, cultural services may not be as important for stakeholders as conceptualised in the research. Second, stakeholders may have experienced difficulties trading-off cultural services with price (incommensurability), as confirmed by attribute non-attendance on the price attribute. Finally, while best-practice non-market valuation surveys are designed to be incentive compatible, asking respondents about a cultural experience with delicate links to a political system might have prevented them from truthfully revealing their preferences. Results on knowledge about the reed dance and wetland management suggested that the respondents were familiar with the reed dance. The third essay used a semi-qualitative approach, the Q methodology to investigate how stakeholders rank ecosystem services provided by Hawane Dam and Nature Reserve. The Q methodology did not require respondents to make trade-offs between services and price but allowed them to rank the importance of different ecosystem services in a transparent and systematic way. We chose the Q methodology among other potential qualitative approaches. Results suggested three contrasting views which were labelled: “water users”, “conservationists”, and “the traditional users”. Stakeholders uniformly recognised two regulatory functions as important: water purification and water flows regulation. The results imply that the consensus views can initiate discussions among stakeholders on ecosystem services to be prioritised and given visibility when designing strategies in incentivising behavioural change. The distinct views could help initiate and facilitate further fruitful discussions, commitment, and future collaborations across stakeholders. Overall, stakeholders ranked cultural services lower relative to other ecosystem services categories suggesting that the Q methodology should have logically come before essay 2 which attempted to elicit preferences for cultural services. Both essays 1 and 3 focused on all ecosystem services while essay 2 was dedicated to cultural services. However, essay 1 broadly assessed ecosystem services in southern Africa while essay 3 focused on ecosystem services in Eswatini and essay 2 focused on preferences for cultural services in Eswatini. In both essay 1 and 3, cultural services were the least reported and ranked relatively lower than other ecosystem services, respectively. The study contributes to reducing the “wickedness” of wetland management challenges and generally to conservation management i.e., it identifies three main viewpoints and consensus views which help initiate discussions. However, the power dynamics should be uncovered and managed for mutually beneficial discussions to take place, especially for local communities with no power to influence decision outcomes. Overall, our results underline the importance of understanding how individuals look at and understand the services being valued and suggest the use of Q methodology as a possible means to prepare a choice experiment. Stakeholder engagements and local community participation are key in both incentives and regulatory legislation discussions to encourage sustainable management of wetlands without adversely affecting local livelihoods.